Strategic Leaders and Corporate Social Responsibility: A Meta-Analytic Review

A large body of literature has focused on strategic leaders’ (i.e., CEOs’, TMT members’, and board directors’) influence on corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, inconsistent findings have been reported, impeding the theoretical and practical implications of this line of inquiry. Drawing from the strategic leadership literature and the corporate governance literature, we conducted a meta-analysis based on 318 samples to consolidate disparate findings on the relationships between frequently measured executive and board attributes and CSR. We also examined country managerial discretion and investor protection strength as potential boundary conditions of these relationships. With some exceptions, our meta-analytic results show that these executive and board attributes explained meaningful variance in CSR, and that country managerial discretion and investor protection strength played limited moderating roles. Additional analyses suggest that the board characteristics had a stronger relationship with CSR than the executive characteristics.